Ganda Singh was born at Hariana in Hoshiarpur district in 1900, served in the army in the Middle East, and became a leading historian of the Sikhs, working from primary documents.
He edited and published Persian sources, contemporary newsletters, hukamnamas and travellers' accounts, and produced the standard biographies of Banda Singh Bahadur Ji and Ahmad Shah Durrani. With Teja Singh he wrote A Short History of the Sikhs.
He founded the department of Punjab historical studies at Punjabi University Patiala and built its archive.
He also compiled, in the 1940s and 1950s, one of the very few contemporary documentary collections on the events of 1947 in Punjab.
Before him Sikh history was written from tradition and from British administrative accounts. After him it had a documentary base. That change is his, and a great deal of what is on this site rests on the sources he printed.
He worked on the eighteenth century, the period for which the Sikh record is thinnest, and he went to the Persian sources rather than relying on the Sikh chronicles.
He edited the journal Punjab Past and Present from Patiala, which printed translated documents alongside articles and is where a great deal of eighteenth century material first appeared in English.
His method has been criticised since for treating the Persian court chronicles as more reliable than the Punjabi sources rather than weighing both. The criticism is fair and it does not touch the documents he printed, which are what survive.